Saint John 4:5–42
In his very fine book, The Road to Character, New York Times columnist and PBS “NewsHour” contributor, David L. Brooks invites us to think deeply “about the difference between resume virtues and eulogy virtues.” Quite simply:
The resume virtues are the ones you list on your resume, the skills that you bring to the job market and that contribute to external success. The eulogy virtues are deeper. They’re the virtues that get talked about at your funeral, the ones that exist at the core of your being – whether you are kind, brave, honest or faithful; what kind of relationships you formed.
Most of us would say that the eulogy virtues are more important than the resume virtues but ... most of us have clearer strategies for how to achieve career success than we do for how to develop a profound character.1
Besides, resumes can be misleading.
While some of us attended schools where ginning up our resumes could get our sorry carcases kicked to the curb for other supposedly noble institutions it seems, that truthfulness doesn’t matter.
We can think of a sitting member of congress whose resume could have won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction but who, so far has only been told publically by one elder statesmen senator from his own party, “You don’t belong here.”2
This church, perhaps like few others in Christendom, can speak from painful experience of how the candidate presented on the printed page turns out to be something less than what was advertized. One, two, three bad experiences can lead one to conclude that resumes are not all that reliable.
You can’t tell much from a resume which may be why Jesus never payed any attention to them.
He called fishermen and made them evangelists. He ate with sinners and tax collectors. If you were overly impressed with your resume, he would give you the business big time but if your resume was a little more than shady, he’d strike up a conversation with you in a very public place in broad daylight. As was the case today as we eavesdrop on the two strangers talking at a well in mid-day.
If Jesus was into reading resumes, he would have immediately noticed that the first line – the space for her name – was blank. It saddens me deeply that, in this month we have set aside to honour women’s history, so many of the names of women in both the old and new testaments are noticeably absent.
So, the first line of this woman’s resume was blank but that didn’t seem to bother Jesus and neither did the line that required the name of her country of origin. He was in Samaria and so, not unexpectedly, she was a Samaritan. Didn’t seem to bother Jesus.
And neither did the box that she would have had to check regarding male or female. Again, the check mark is in the wrong box. Female meant she was someone who was not to be spoken to by a male in public and especially a Samaritan woman and a Jewish male.
But Jesus had this strange habit of “befriending the people nobody else would befriend; befriending the people that other’s despised; befriending the people who everybody else thinks are what’s wrong with the world.”3
Dr. Scott Black Johnson thinks that Jesus begins the conversation sounding a great deal like “a customer at a 7-Eleven who has forgot his manners.”4
“Give me a drink.”5 he says. And she replies like one of the overnight shift workers at The Weiner’s Circle. “How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a woman of Samaria?”6
This conversation is not off to a great start. Ethnic, sexual, theological, sociological differences are being laid bare right there in the midday sun.
Still the conversation continues because Jesus looks beyond her resume.
As David L. Brooks said in his column last Tuesday. “You give me somebody who disagrees with me on every issue, but who has a good heart — who has the ability to sympathize with others, participate in their woes, longings and dreams — well, I want to stay with that person all day.”7
And it looks like these two just might be there all day until Jesus comes up with a real conversation stopper. “Go, call your husband, and come back.”8 he says in a mike drop moment.
It gets even worse when the woman has to admit that, at the moment, she doesn’t have a husband. I can’t imagine the tone remained friendly. Jesus had touched a sore spot.
“All too true!” Jesus said. “For you have had five husbands, and you aren’t even married to the man you’re living with now.”9
It is almost as if, at this point, readers, listeners, and scholars have given themselves permission to run wild with the woman’s resume.
Ah, now we know the reason she was drawing water at noon.
Even the wonderful and usually insightful, Dr. Barbara Brown Taylor, puts a negative spin on this poor woman’s resume, writing of her in a Christian Century article.
She was ... a ... fallen woman. Respectable women made their trips to the well in the morning, when they could greet one another and talk about the news. But this woman was one of the people they talked about, and the fact that she showed up at noon was a sure sign that she was not welcome at their morning social hour.10
Let this “good old boy” take an eraser to the suppositions about this poor woman’s resume.
How about death? It doesn’t take much to imagine that the pain of her over outliving one or two husbands might have been enough to for her to pull the covers over her head and leave them there until the sun was high in the sky. Anybody who has experienced one death has discovered that afterwards you just don’t feel like wading out into large crowds no matter if your water supply was running low.
What if she managed to marry five losers in a row? Boxes of rocks, empty. Or, what if the men were bounders, cads? Even if all the women were completely on her side and thought all of the guys she had been with were jerks who would want to talk about what dopes they were day after day?
Any of these reasons are far more probable and much more kind than pinning a label on her, calling into question her morals, and, worse yet, having it stick through the centuries.
I think it was Jesus’ willingness to look beyond her resume that brought about her realization that he was something special. He saw her for who she really was, another child of God, and it touched her deeply.
It had to have been a beautiful moment when she discovered, as it is for all of us when we discover, that we are more than what other’s are saying about us or we are saying about ourselves. It comes when we discover that we are loved by God.
I think that is what caused the woman to drop her water bucket, leave Jesus standing by himself at the well with an empty cup still in hand and run into town with her proclamation that was really a question.
“In her, ‘He’s not the Messiah – is he?’ I hear a playful openness, a wonderful willingness to consider that God was larger than her preconceptions. [It is a] first step, a courageous willingness to be shocked, surprised, intruded upon”11 and included.
That’s why she went back to town! She wanted to include others in this love she had found. And look at what happened.
On the strength of her word the people decide to include others too. The people of her village don’t throw Jesus and his equally Jewish followers out of town but rather they ask them to hang around for a couple of days.
This would have been unheard of! It would be like the Democrats and Republicans not only having their conventions at the same time, in the same city, but in the same building. It would be like FOX News and MSNBC sharing the same headquarters. It would be like Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia having dinner together, and going to the opera together, and going on vacation together. Oh, wait! That really did happen! And so did this!
A Samaritan town welcomed Jewish guests all on the strength of one woman’s witness.
Dr. John Buchanan of Fourth Church let his imagination run wild in a sermon describing what this might have been like.
The Samaritans invite the Jews to stay with them for a while and, remarkably, they do, for two days. What a picture—Jews and Samaritans, men and women, walking back to town together, eating together for two days, sleeping under the same roofs together.12
People who had believed each other to be so socially
and theologically different that they would even use the same set of dinnerware were now having a party.
Nothing like that had ever happened before. Ancient enemies, people who believed in the very depths of their hearts that the others were so wrong, so outside orthodox definitions of morality, that contact with them was repugnant, unthinkable—those people spent two days together. They must have eaten together. They must have shared dishes and utensils and cups even. They had never done anything like that in their lives. They must have slept under the same roofs. I’ll bet they had a party. I’ll bet they had a banquet and drank a little wine—men and women, Jews and Samaritans. And I’ll bet before Jesus and his friends left to resume their journey to Galilee, they embraced.13
And when it came time for the eulogy at her memorial service I bet not a single word from her resume was mentioned.
Who cared that she slept in and didn’t make it to the well until midday? Who cared that she was a Samaritan who befriended a Jewish rabbi and his band of merry men and women? Who cared about how many husbands she had? Who cared about any of that?
I bet, in the eulogy they talked about her virtues and how she brought their town together. I bet they talked about how she taught them the wonder of reaching out to others rather than living in the profound loneliness of their self-imposed isolation. I bet they talked about what a character she was.
But most of all – best of all – I hope they said she helped them meet Jesus, hear him, get to know him, believe in him, and let their lives be changed by him.
I hope they said that she showed them Jesus and they fell in love with him.
I can only hope something like that is said over me in the eulogy at my memorial service.
How about you?
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1. David Brooks, The Road to Character (Penguin Books, 2016), xi.
2. Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick, “'You Don't Belong Here': Romney Rebukes George Santos at State of the Union,” Time (Time, February 8, 2023), https://time.com/6253829/mitt-romney-george-santos-state-of-the-union/.
3. James D. Howell, John 4:5-42. Sermon preached at the Myers Park United Methodist Church, Charlotte, North Carolina. February 23, 2023.
4. Scott Black Johnson, “Truth.” Sermon preached at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. March 5, 2023.
5. St. John 4:7b. (NRSV) [NRSV=The New Revised Standard Version]
6. St. John 4:9. (NRSV)
7. David L. Brooks, “The Power of Art in a Political, Technological Age,” The Aurora Beacon News (The New York Times, March 6, 2023), https://digitaledition.aurorabeaconnews.chicagotribune.com/html5/desktop/production/default.aspx?&edid=6daa52d3-71ba-4876-bd3c-bde1e1282c62.
8. St. John 4:16. (NRSV)
9. St. John 4:18. (TLB) [TLB=The Living Bible. (Carol Stream: Tyndale House Publishers, 1971)]
10. Barbara Brown Taylor, “Identity Confirmation: John 4:5-42. The Christian Century. February 12, 2008.
11. William H. Willimon, “Ordinary Revelation.” Pulpit Resource 33, no. 1 (2005): 37–40.
12. John M. Buchanan, “Astonished.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. February 27, 2005.
13. John M. Buchanan, “Included.” Sermon preached at The Fourth Presbyterian Church of Chicago. March 3, 2002.
Sermon preached at Evangelical Lutheran Church of Saint Luke
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rldCPR5X_GM
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